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Topic: Holocaust (Read 2243 times)

"Three of the best known works on the Second World War are General Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill's The Second World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to be found.

I'm not surely this really deserves a response, but....the first two at least (and the title of the third presumes) that they are histories of the military development of the war. Churchill and Eisenhower talk at length about numbers of tanks and where divisions were posted....very much a telling of the war, as opposed to the details of civilian life. Churchill, for example, does not appear to mention evacuees - should we therefore assume that they also did not exist?

I'm not surely this really deserves a response, but....the first two at least (and the title of the third presumes) that they are histories of the military development of the war. Churchill and Eisenhower talk at length about numbers of tanks and where divisions were posted....very much a telling of the war, as opposed to the details of civilian life. Churchill, for example, does not appear to mention evacuees - should we therefore assume that they also did not exist?

Between the three, there are over 7000 pages printed. Dont you find it strange that not one of these high ranking men mention the gassing of individuals?

Plenty. There were American soldiers who found Jews who were at these death camps, for example. The testimony of surviving Jews who were rescued, for another.

How string is the testimony of the survivors? Could they make some of the stuff up?

Yes, it is certainly within the realm of possibility that the event of the Holocaust is made up. That possibility seems almost as feasible as the continent of Antarctica being made up as well. In both cases there is a lot of additional evidence beyond personal testimony to suggest the existence of the Holocaust and of Antarctica.

If personal testimony doesn't do it for you, then by all means go to Auschwitz and look at the objective physical evidence yourself. Seriously - plane tickets are (sort of) reasonably priced these days.

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"When we landed on the moon, that was the point where god should have come up and said 'hello'. Because if you invent some creatures, put them on the blue one and they make it to the grey one, you f**king turn up and say 'well done'."

I'm not surely this really deserves a response, but....the first two at least (and the title of the third presumes) that they are histories of the military development of the war. Churchill and Eisenhower talk at length about numbers of tanks and where divisions were posted....very much a telling of the war, as opposed to the details of civilian life. Churchill, for example, does not appear to mention evacuees - should we therefore assume that they also did not exist?

Between the three, there are over 7000 pages printed. Don't you find it strange that not one of these high ranking men mention the gassing of individuals?

The archive contains a variety of sources, particularly: eye witness reports of survivors, documents related to the development and management of the camp, post-war trial records, and holdings of the international prisoner committee founded after liberation

Plus the library has over 14,000 documents relating what happend there.You can go see this stuff yourself. This is just 1 camp.

You can't say that 10's of thousands of people made up the same story. You can't say all of the 1,000's of photos are made up.You can't say the prefabricated bunkers were made post 1945 to make the nazi regime look bad.You can't say all of the SS troops who confessed at trial were lying.

I can tell you that I had breakfast this morning.I can show you the cereal packet.I can show you the used milk carton.I can show you the dirty bowl.I could, at a push, regurgitate some of it and fedex it to you in a bag.

You could still say that because you hadn't seen me eat it that I didn't have breakfast. You would, however, be denying something that on the balance of probabilities you could be 99% sure did happen.

Before you do it don't make the mistake of comparing something verifiable and human with something that is make believe...

"Three of the best known works on the Second World War are General Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill's The Second World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to be found.

You are an objectionable cretin. I move that you are banned so you might be able to spend more time at KKK meetings and other White Supremacist get-togethers.

Holocaust deniers are despicable and fringe tinfoil hatters. A friend of mine, recently dead, had the tattoo marks of Sobibor extermination campWiki on her arm. She saw what happened and what happened to her parents and brother.

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Nobody says “There are many things that we thought were natural processes, but now know that a god did them.”

How string is the testimony of the survivors? Could they make some of the stuff up?

Certainly, they could have[1]. But it isn't just their stories. They were found emaciated and starving, worked past exhaustion, some were even little more than skin and bones. Evidence of the gas chambers, the crematoriums, and other things was also found. Records were found detailing various aspects of the plan to efficiently kill off as many Jews as possible.

You know what really gets me about this latest line of questioning? It's the fact that you're trying to claim that the reality of the Holocaust is based on nothing more solid than personal testimony, the same as belief in your god, so you can then claim that your god must be real if the Holocaust is. It is absolutely disgusting of you to attempt to use this horrific tragedy as an attempt to validate your own personal beliefs, and you should stop and think really hard about just what that implies about your religious beliefs.

And this ^^^ is why it's critical that we keep calling out people who question tales of genocide.

Genocide has happened before. It is happening right now, somewhere on this planet. It almost certainly will happen again.

Let us not forget. Let us not become complacent and assume that someone else will put a stop to it.

And above all else, may we continue to grow in compassion and understanding. This is painful stuff to deal with, and we need to become strong enough so that we don't see someone else's suffering as just an inconvenient, ugly image on the 6 o'clock news.

And this ^^^ is why it's critical that we keep calling out people who question tales of genocide.

I get what you mean, but I think questioning things is okay. Especially if it is an honest question and not trollery. There is a difference between questioning an event and denying an event for which there is abundant and irrefutable evidence.

I think it is better to answer holybuckets' goofy proposition with evidence than to just shut him down, even if he is trolling. If the truth is on your side, then questions are not to be feared.

And this ^^^ is why it's critical that we keep calling out people who question tales of genocide.

I get what you mean, but I think questioning things is okay. Especially if it is an honest question and not trollery. There is a difference between questioning an event and denying an event for which there is abundant and irrefutable evidence.

I think it is better to answer holybuckets' goofy proposition with evidence than to just shut him down, even if he is trolling. If the truth is on your side, then questions are not to be feared.

And this ^^^ is why it's critical that we keep calling out people who question tales of genocide.

Genocide has happened before. It is happening right now, somewhere on this planet. It almost certainly will happen again.

Let us not forget. Let us not become complacent and assume that someone else will put a stop to it.

And above all else, may we continue to grow in compassion and understanding. This is painful stuff to deal with, and we need to become strong enough so that we don't see someone else's suffering as just an inconvenient, ugly image on the 6 o'clock news.

And this ^^^ is why it's critical that we keep calling out people who question tales of genocide.

I get what you mean, but I think questioning things is okay. Especially if it is an honest question and not trollery. There is a difference between questioning an event and denying an event for which there is abundant and irrefutable evidence.

I think it is better to answer holybuckets' goofy proposition with evidence than to just shut him down, even if he is trolling. If the truth is on your side, then questions are not to be feared.

You are right. Questioning is good. Denial when faced with overwhelming evidence - not so good.

People could have made up the Holocaust, but we have physical evidence of it. But even if we had no physical evidence, the aftermath of all that trauma lives on in the lives of the survivors and their descendants--and in the lives of the perpetrators and their descendants.

As the Nazi Holocaust survivors die off, their kids (like a Jewish colleague of mine) and grandkids are under tremendous pressure to never let people forget and say it never happened. That psychological weight of survivor guilt is one of the reasons that Israel is so screwed up. The bad stuff does not just disappear. The trauma keeps on hurting people, who hurt other people, and so on.

You see it with Native people in the Americas--and the people who want to deny anything bad happened. You see it with the descendents of African slavery in the Americas--and the people who want to deny anything bad happened. You see it in post-apartheid South Africa--and the people who want to deny anything bad happened.

Where are Dr. Ruth's relatives? Where are my friend's relatives? If they were not killed in the death camps, where are they? Still hiding in basements in Amsterdam? Secretly beamed to Alpha Centauri?

I think it is better to answer holybuckets' goofy proposition with evidence than to just shut him down, even if he is trolling. If the truth is on your side, then questions are not to be feared.

Brave and noble but...

There is plenty out there that will confirm that the holocaust took place. The arsehole knows how to find it as easily as we do. This is not a new argument.

There is a class of deranged person, who, for whatever reason, usually rampant anti-semitism and extreme right-wing views, and virtually no critical thinking skills, becomes a holocaust denier.

If you want evidence of the lengths that people go to, David IrvingWiki

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Irving's reputation as an historian was widely discredited after he brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books.[4] The English court found that Irving was an active holocaust denier, anti-semite, and racist, who "associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism",[5] and that he had "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".[5][6]

is your starting point. Irving, who is not the mouthbreather and bottom-feeder that holybuckets is, has famously lost court cases. There was, on these occasions, evidence to satisfy a court that the holocaust happened. Holybuckets can look this stuff up himself but he won't.

If you want a re-run against holybuckets, who himself will provide no evidence, simply question yours, carry on.

My Uncle was an American soldier in Germany at the end of the war, and helped liberate one of the camps. He occasionally told war stories, but never mentioned the death camps. My mom was the one that told me that he had been involved with the liberation of one.

About eight years ago at a family reunion we were talking and I asked him. He said nothing but just gave his head a little shake and it was obvious to me that he didn't want to talk about it.

A few hours later he came up to me and said (This is approximately verbatim. I don't remember the exact wording. but It gets the correct idea across). "You asked me earlier about something I cannot talk about. I can't because what I saw there was so terrible I simply can't speak about it. I'd seen bodies from D-Day on and was very used to it, but I've never been able to get what I saw at that camp out of my head."

I had a college chemistry professor who was a death camp survivor. I know this not because he talked about it in class, but because I read a newspaper story about him a few years before I took his class. He always wore long sleeved shirts but one day while visiting his office I saw part of the tattoo on his forearm when the sleeve slid up enough to uncover it.

Devious people who wanted to deceive us could make claims about a few tens of thousands, or perhaps even a hundred thousand people, being killed in death camps. But lying about the deaths of millions would take a lot of chutzpah if it didn't happen. And remember, we didn't have the wherewithal to fake all those films of the bodies and the starving survivors. We could fake it easily now, but not back in '45.

History happens. You are right to ask about how accurate history is, given that it is written by the victors, and hence subject to distortion. But people don't get to make up their own version simply because they want the past to have been different. There is way too much evidence in this case.

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It isn't true that non-existent gods can't do anything. For instance, they were able to make me into an atheist.

As a teen working in a Jewish neighborhood, I remember old people who wore long sleeves (and sometimes, even gloves) in the summertime to cover up the tattoos. It's hard to even imagine what they felt each time they saw the numbers on their arms.

How string is the testimony of the survivors? Could they make some of the stuff up?

My best friend has personally seen the numbers tattooed on the arm of a parent of one of her childhood friends. I'm inclined to believe her, and her friend, and her friend's parent.

This has nothing to do with the alleged gas chambers. Tattooing was a way to identify prisoners. "While it cannot be determined with absolute certainty, it seems that tattooing was implemented mainly for ease of identification whether in the case of death or escape; the practice continued until the last days of Auschwitz." http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/tattoos1.html

I used to work down the hall from a program that served holocaust survivors. Little old men and women with canes and walkers would shuffle in and have ice cream socials and listen to big band music together. The program closed down about 15 years ago. There are so few of them left.

But you know what? We have more than testimony. More than survivor testimony. More than survivor tattoos. More than the testimony of witnesses who were shocked by what they saw as they entered the camps. More than the pictures that they took to document the horrors. We have the camps themselves. The ovens. I saw them in Dachau with my parents when I was 8 years old. We have logs the Germans themselves created. We have many of the artifacts that were found at the camps. The shoes. The suitcases. The hair. The rings. The gold dug out of their teeth. Tens of thousands of wedding rings found at a single camp.

But Jews during the holocaust were most certainly not the only human beings to experience horrors. As 12 Monkeys and Astreja have already pointed out, there are other horrors that have happened, and continue to happen.

Just this week, we saw a major milestone in a much more recent attempt at genocide, right here in the Americas. Former dictator Rios Montt was convicted of genocide crimes against humanity, by a court of law in his native Guatemala. I worked with many of the survivors, in an error in which our own president assured the world that no such violence was taking place. Today, the forensic evidence is overwhelming.

I could only find two English language videos on youtube. This should be such a huge story. But it is not.

Holybucket, I genuinely have no idea what your intentions were when you started this thread. Did you intend to argue that Christians did not massacre Jews? Did you intend to argue that all we have is testimony of Jews to support the holocaust, just like all Christians is their testimony to support the resurrection? Would you care to attempt to explain yourself?

"Three of the best known works on the Second World War are General Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill's The Second World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to be found.

I have seen Nazi propaganda films that show the Death camps. The Nazi's are like those in American Baseball: they keep impeccable records. Or were the Nazi's themselves making up this fantasy that so many people deny?

-Nam

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Things I've said here:

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I only have a filter for people who do not consistently beg to be belittled, ridiculed, insulted, and demeaned.

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I may believe people, as a whole, should be treated fairly but I also believe those same people are idiots.